Why a Game CDN is Beneficial for Emerging Developer Markets

Many software developers focus on the United States and Europe, but they miss the massive revenue generated by emerging markets. The Middle East and Africa generate $3.2 billion in gaming revenue each year. Several Asia-Pacific countries have places in the top 20 revenue generating markets in video gaming. It’s imperative that gaming developers use a CDN that has a point of presence (PoP) in these geographic regions.

Turkey is #3 in the World of Gamers

According to Newzoo, Turkey ranks #3 in the world and has 70% of the PC gaming traffic. It’s estimated that over 22 million gamers are located in Turkey, and they spend most of their time playing PC games. PC games can be several gigabytes in downloads, and updates and patches are frequent especially with an MMO game.

Tablet and handheld games are popular, but not in Turkey. One of the main differences between these games and PC games is that tablet and smartphones have limited space and games must take smaller amounts of storage. For this reason, PC game developers must work harder to ensure optimized code and infrastructure to deliver content in the fastest way possible.

India Emerges as a Gaming Population

India has been climbing into the top 20 as an emerging market. As of 2016, India was #18 in the top 20 countries that represent the gaming community. India is a bit different than Turkey. Most of their gamers’ interest lie in the mobile market. It’s estimated that Indian gamers will bring in $1.1 billion by 2020 in mobile gaming revenue.

The mobile gaming market is harder to optimize especially with slower bandwidth speeds and resources. Gaming developers must be able to reduce the size of downloads, but also deliver updates quickly. Although downloads might only be a few hundred megabytes, having thousands of users attempt to download content from just one server. A CDN can help reduce the overhead of having one server for downloading content and distribute your user traffic across several databases and edge servers.

How a CDN Helps

A good game CDN offers PoPs in several geographic locations including the ones that have a high amount of users for your software. These PoPs provide edge servers that pull data from your origin server and cache it. Cached content processes and delivers faster to any user whether it’s a PC download or for a mobile device.

During heavy traffic after a new release or patch day, a CDN still pulls data from your origin server but caches the latest content giving your users smaller queue times.

Faster response times and quicker downloads are key to retaining your gaming customers. As soon as your game responds too slow, gamers leave for another platform. Usually, their friends leave to follow them to the next game and revenue drops. The best user experience that you can give your users is low ping times, fast downloads and an optimal gaming experience. A CDN can help with that.

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